Cranked Up

With more young people getting caught in the maelstrom of
methamphetamine abuse, school and community leaders are struggling
to come to their rescue.

If it hadn't been for the help of her high school counselor, Charla
Witcher believes, crank would have killed her.

Though she's been clean for more than a year, the 18-year-old senior
at Natrona County High School still wakes up every morning with scars
on her arms and cravings for the drug—physical remnants of a
powerful addiction that turned this middle-class teenager into a
dropout, a vandal, and a burglar before she finally broke the
choke-hold that methamphetamine had on her life.

She visits Jim Johnson's tiny office on the third floor of the high
school once a week, sometimes more, in an effort to stay straight.

"I want to help people the way Jim helps people," says Witcher, who
hopes to go to college to become a teacher after she graduates this
year. "In a way, he saved my life."

While Witcher's story is dramatic, it is by no means unique in
Casper, a commercial hub of 45,000 residents in the center of a rural
state with three times as many cattle as people. Like their
counterparts in many other towns in the West and Midwest, community
leaders here have been working to conquer escalating methamphetamine
use over the past several years. While meth, or "crank," as it is
commonly known, is still mostly abused by adults in their 20s and 30s,
law-enforcement and school officials say the potent stimulant has found
its way into the hands of many teenagers—often with devastating
results.

"This stuff is so strong and so debilitating that kids who use it go
downhill so quickly," says Wayne Beatty, the safe-schools administrator
for the 12,000-student Natrona County district. "They drop out of
school and end up in the criminal-justice system.

"With counselors trained in how to deal with substance-abuse issues
in every high school and junior high, and education programs that tell
teachers how to spot early signs of drug use, district officials here
say they are working to get help as quickly as they can to the students
who need it. Local instructors for the Drug Abuse Resistance Education,
or DARE, program and other teachers also talk about meth during drug
education classes. They hope students will steer clear of the drug once
they learn about its consequences.

While marijuana and alcohol are still far more popular with young
people here, school officials say methamphetamine use—even among
a relatively low percentage of students—is simply too destructive
to ignore."

Meth gets a hold of kids, and by the time you find out, they're very
harmfully involved," says Patricia Silva, a nurse at Natrona County
High School. "It's a very rapid downward spiral."

Charla Witcher knows all about such downward spirals. She says she
started experimenting with marijuana at age 13, then graduated to meth
two years later when her father introduced her to the drug.

She watched him shoot up in front of her, she recalls, and wanted to
experience it herself.

"It was a really neat high at first—you did it and it was just
this explosive amount of energy," Witcher says. "My Dad's philosophy
was if I was going to do it, and I did it in front of him, it was
OK."

Attempts to reach Witcher's father for comment were unsuccessful.But
the early highs soon plunged into crippling lows, and by the time she
was 16, Witcher was doing meth nearly every day just to get out of bed
in the morning. Without it, her body ached and even everyday tasks
became difficult. She was working with her counselor, Johnson, at the
time, but became concerned that teachers and fellow students knew too
much about her drug use. She dropped out of school.

Though she is almost 6 feet tall, Witcher dropped to 120 pounds, and
her skin turned gray.

‘As a
parent, you sit there and think, ‘Is she alive or is she
dead?’’

Elene
Medicraft
Charla Witcher's mother

She began stealing from family and friends to support her habit, and
later burglarized a local antiques store, intending to hawk the wares
in Denver so she could buy more meth. Arrested for the crime, she then
broke her probation agreement and ran away from Casper with a boyfriend
and another friend.

Witcher's mother, who is divorced from her father, said the time
when her daughter was missing was perhaps the hardest of all.

"You don't sleep," says Elene Medicraft, who works as a computer
clerk at the high school. "As a parent, you sit there and think, 'Is
she alive or is she dead?' I really thought I was going to get a call
in the spring, when the ranchers do their fence lines, and hear that
they had found her body."

She got a call from her daughter instead. Witcher had been abandoned
by her traveling partners across the state in Rock Springs and wanted
to come home. When she arrived, she was arrested and sentenced to
attend the Wyoming Girls' School, a correctional facility for juvenile
offenders. She stayed drug-free during the nine months she was there,
but slipped up after she was home for a month and exposed to her old
life. Johnson and her mother and teachers held a meeting with Witcher
to intervene, and she got the message. She says she has been clean ever
since.

"Every day I wake up with the pain and the memories," says Witcher,
who has served on several local panels in an effort to educate
community members about the drug. "I try to make them understand what
it does to people."

Wyoming law-enforcement officials say that the current wave of
methamphetamine use first reared its head in this community and
elsewhere in 1993, though it is hardly a new phenomenon. The drug once
carried the street name of crystal meth, or "ice," and was also popular
in the 1960s and 1970s. Crank is a powdery upper that can be injected,
snorted, smoked, or even eaten—options that make the drug more
socially acceptable to users who wish to steer clear of needles.

Part of meth's appeal to some young people is that the drug works by
stimulating the nervous system like cocaine, making people at first
feel euphoric, capable, and full of life. Users can initially stay up
all night and still function and concentrate the next day, even perform
better on tests than they did while not using it, said Dr. Berton J.
Toews, a local psychiatrist who serves on the Natrona County district's
safe- and drug-free schools advisory panel.

"It's an incredibly powerful drug," Toews says. "There's probably
nothing in the world that feels better than your first use of coke or
meth."

But unlike a cocaine high, which lasts for a couple of hours at
most, a crank high often lasts for a full eight to 14 hours. In
addition, the drug initially enhances sexual feelings and works as an
appetite-suppressant—a side effect of the drug that makes it
alluring for body-conscious young women who would do just about
anything to lose weight.

Johnson remembers a girl who thinned down significantly in the early
stages of a meth habit, and feared that stopping her use of the drug
would bring the pounds back."

She said, 'I do meth because guys like me now that I'm so skinny,' "
Johnson says. "Two weeks later, she was gone. She just dropped
out."

Methamphetamine is also much cheaper to buy than cocaine and some
other drugs. For just $60 a gram, "you can be up night and day," says
Bryan Gimbel, an 18-year-old who attends the district's Rebound School,
an alternative program for students who can't attend traditional high
schools for disciplinary or personal reasons. "Last summer, I probably
slept just three weeks out of the whole summer."

And though the drug is perhaps not as easy to come by as alcohol,
students here say they don't have to look too long or far to find
it.

Sabrina Schossow, an 18-year-old attending the Rebound School, says
many students see meth as a natural next step when they want to get
high more cheaply and quickly than they can with marijuana."After pot,
you do crank," says Schossow. "There's usually somebody who knows
somebody who knows how to get it."

State officials say their efforts to beat back the onslaught of meth
are made more challenging because the drug takes multiple routes into
communities and into dealers' hands.

Wyoming's wide open spaces and blustery winds make it fertile
ground for meth production.

Much of the local meth supply is imported to the state from California
and Mexico. But the drug can also be cooked up easily by local dealers,
who can buy several hundred dollars' worth of such ingredients as
over-the-counter cold or asthma medicine, drain cleaner, battery acid,
and iodine to produce several thousand dollars' worth of meth. Recipes
for the drug are widely available on the Internet. And while meth labs
might be more readily detectable in densely populated areas—the
cooking process emits a strong stench similar to that of cat
urine—Wyoming's wide open spaces and blustery winds make it
fertile ground for meth production.

"You can be a high school dropout at age 16 and cook up $500 worth
of crank for $20 in materials and make a pretty good living," says
Carol Eckstrom Hardy, the supervisor of New Horizons, a local
residential drug-treatment center. "And here, you can drive up and down
the interstate and cook it in the back of a van if you want to. It's
been done."

Wyoming's law-enforcement agents have clamped down on meth dealers
and producers over the past several years. They expect to break up at
least 50 meth labs throughout the state this year, compared with only
two such busts in 1997. In addition, state lawmakers recently approved
a $5.5 million anti-meth initiative for the upcoming biennial budget
cycle, most of which will go toward treatment and prevention
education.Schools and other community organizations must play a role in
decreasing the demand for the drug, state leaders say, if the state is
ultimately to win its war on meth."

If you don't cut the demand, you don't solve the problem," says
Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer. "Schools are among the first to know if
something is wrong with kids. Parents are among the last to know."

To that end, the state division of law enforcement is now piloting a
comprehensive, multiyear life-skills curriculum that addresses
methamphetamine and other drugs. State officials say they hope the
program will fill the gaps left by DARE programs, like the one in
Natrona County, that serve students in only one grade."You can't expect
that a 16-week program will be enough to keep a kid off of drugs for
life," says Thomas J. Pagel, the director of the state's
criminal-investigation division. "It has to be a consistent message
that builds from year to year."

Beatty of the Natrona County district acknowledges the limitations
of the DARE program, in which local police officers talk to 6th graders
about the dangers of drug use. But he says the school system's program
is strengthened by the fact that drug education is also woven into
life-skills education in other grades. When districts believe that all
they need is DARE, he says, they're setting themselves up for
failure.

Timothy McIntire, an officer with the Casper Police Department who
teaches DARE classes at five elementary schools, says he often brings
in popular 9th graders who don't use drugs or alcohol at parties to
serve as role models for the 6th graders. He also discusses meth, using
a display board to show students what the drug looks like and
describing its toxic ingredients and crushing impact on users. Because
meth overstimulates and thereby weakens the heart, users run the risk
of suffering a heart attack or stroke long after they've stopped using
the drug.

"It's out there, it's easy to get, and it's just so addictive,"
McIntire says. "We even have junior high school students using it.
That's the really scary thing."

Thomas James, a 17-year-old junior at the Rebound School, sees the
district's DARE program as a waste of time and money. Providing
information about drugs to students interested in doing them, he says,
is only going to pique their curiosity.

"The thing that DARE does is give kids a selection," he argues.
"It's like a menu for drugs."

But at the Wyoming Girls' School, where 59 percent of the school's
90 students say they have used meth in the past, 17-year-old Tara says
she never knew what exactly crank was when she was doing it—and
that the information might have made a difference to her."

I cannot believe I smoked that stuff and shot it into my veins,"
says Tara, whose 25-year-old then-boyfriend supplied her with the drug
when she was 16.

Her classmate, 17-year-old Erica, agrees. School administrators
requested that the girls' last names not be used.

"I never even heard about meth when I was young," says Erica, who
started using the drug when she was 12. "I think if younger kids had
information on it, it might get them to think."

Natrona County school officials say that teachers—who have
regular contact with students but lack the emotional involvement that
can skew parents' perceptions—are in an ideal position to
recognize drug use in teenagers and intervene while it is still in the
early stages.

The district is working to increase the possibility of such
interventions by offering a five-evening course several times a year
for teachers on how to recognize potential drug abuse by students.
Teachers can sign up for the voluntary 3 1/2-hour classes to fulfill
professional-development requirements or gain college credit.

In one recent session, Beatty brought in a panel of students who
were knowledgable about drug use in the community to talk about the
scope of the problem among Casper's teenagers. The 54-year-old
safe-schools administrator, whom many characterize as a powerful force
behind the district's drive to combat substance abuse generally and
methamphetamine use in particular, also leads a session specifically
focusing on crank. He tells teachers to look for common side effects
that meth users—sometimes known as "tweakers"—often share:
rapid weight loss; unusual acne, welts, or skin blemishes; and erratic
or cranky moods. He acknowledges that this last symptom can be tricky
to distinguish from typical adolescent behavior.

‘The
hardest thing I have to deal with is the indifference of parents
and the denial kids have about their abuse.’

Jim
Johnson,
Counselor,
Natrona County High School

Teachers who spot signs of drug use are encouraged to talk to school
administrators about their suspicions.

"We need to make those connections so that everyone is helping and
watching, and everyone is responsible," says Stan Olson, the district's
superintendent.

Despite such efforts, the district has rarely cracked down on
students for possessing meth, or being under its influence. Last school
year, by contrast, the district took action against 114 students for
having or using marijuana in school, and 69 students for using alcohol.
Only one student was reported for meth, and there were just three
meth-related reports the year before.

But district administrators say such numbers don't reflect what they
hear anecdotally about meth use, and know about it from state
statistics. Recent school surveys show that meth use among students in
Wyoming is approximately three times the national average, says Page l
of the state division of criminal investigation.

"It's easy for a district to hide its head or turn away in the face
of information like that," Pagel says. "You have to give the Natrona
County school district a lot of credit. They've been right out in front
in dealing with this."

School officials typically suspend students they suspect of any drug
use or possession during school hours, and they give parents
information about arranging for a drug test if a student wishes to
contest the school's charges. Students facing drug charges for the
first time would not be suspended for more than 10 days, and then would
be given a chance to correct their behavior.

By referring suspected drug users to in-school counselors who meet
with such students regularly and confidentially, district officials
also say they are working to treat substance abuse as more of a health
concern than a disciplinary matter.

The Natrona County district has a $320,000 annual contract with the
Central Wyoming Counseling Center, a nonprofit organization, to provide
18 certified counselors to cover the district's 33 schools. The junior
high schools and high schools have access to counselors on an almost
full-time basis, while the elementary schools share the counselors'
time. In an era when some districts are economizing by cutting
counseling, Natrona County increased its budget for counseling services
by 14 percent from fiscal 1998 to fiscal 1999. Beatty says the budget
boost can be linked to the social ills students are increasingly
dealing with at home that are "related to, but not exclusively tied to,
meth use."

But while relationships like the one between Jim Johnson and Charla
Witcher exemplify the good that can come from counseling programs, not
every drug user will be reached that way. Johnson must get approval
from the parents of students referred to him before he can sit down
with them—a hurdle he says he can't always clear.

"The hardest thing I have to deal with is the indifference of
parents and the denial kids have about their abuse," Johnson says.
"There are kids here who are drug users who avoid me like the
plague."

The district also gives students another therapeutic outlet for
help: support groups. High school and junior high school teachers who
have been trained to guide such sessions sit down with interested
students in different groups one period a week, during school hours, to
help them cope with such problems as depression and parents' divorces.
The district pays substitutes to fill in for the teachers for that one
period, in addition to covering the cost of the teachers' training.

The district's primary goal for the program is to connect students
with adults and peers who care about them, says Silva, the school
nurse, who coordinates the support-group program at Natrona County
High, known as Student Assistance in Life, or SAIL.

Students who meet with Johnson for substance-abuse counseling later
get together in the so-called recovery support group.

Though district leaders consider the 11-year-old SAIL program a
success, they have learned not to expect cookie-cutter results.

Success in the substance-abuse small group might mean that a student
didn't drop out this year, passed three out of six classes, or cut back
on the amount of drugs he or she uses, Silva says. It is less likely to
mean that a student has stopped using all drugs or
alcohol—something she says is rare.

"Abstinence may not be everything," Silva suggests. "My yardstick
for whether these groups are successful is if the kids keep coming. If
the kids keep coming, they're getting something out of it."

But Tara and other former meth users at the girls' school say that
even their local schools' best-intentioned efforts fell on deaf ears.
If you're a teenager bent on numbing yourself with chemicals, they say,
you're not likely to be interested in accepting help.

"I was approached by teachers several times," says Tara, whose
physical reaction to the drug was so consuming that she sometimes
chewed off pieces of her own tongue.

"I could have had all the help in the world," she says. "I just
didn't choose to use it."

The final
report of the Interagency Methamphetamine Task Force, established
by the U.S. Department of Justice,
presents guiding principles, recommendations, and research needs
identified by the task force.

The Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons provides
a "home medical guide" on Teenagers and
Drugs, including prevention tips.

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